I really do appreciate all of your input, Tom! I decided to go with the less-than-optimal kitchen layout. I'm going to leave the refrigerator free-standing, not enclosed, and it will be on the other side of the stairwell entrance, across from the kitchen. That means it will slightly block the glass piece that fits into place there, but at least it gets it out of the way of the rest of the room.

I also decided to extend the wall that the equipment closet is on by a couple of feet. As it is now, the equipment closet is the last section of wall, meaning there's no place on that wall to mount the left surround. Adding just two more feet (or maybe I can get away with increasing it to 32") of wall there will give me space to mount without obstructing the bedroom or bathroom entrances. Not a lot of leeway for placement of the surround channel, but hopefully it will work out decently. It also places the surround a little bit forward of the support post, so the interaction should be minimal. If it turns out I want to play with more placement options, I'll utilize ceiling mounts, which I do have laying around because that's how I originally thought I would be mounting all of my surround speakers.

Anyway, I think the refrigerator being by the stairwell and the extended left wall are the best I can do for acoustics.

Tomorrow, Lundeen Simonson out of Spokane is going to start grinding down the concrete floor in the basement. I decided to go with polished concrete.

I'd forgotten I was interested in polished concrete until I was looking at flooring options again. After being unable to find the same vinyl style I liked before, I suddenly remembered the pictures I'd seen of polished concrete and did some searching. I could only find two places that seemed to do polished concrete in the Tri-Cities, both based in Spokane. I emailed the first place because they had residential projects in their portfolio. I wasn't even going to email Lundeen Simonson, since their website only showed work at companies and schools with vast stretches of concrete. I went ahead and emailed them on the off-chance, simply asking if they could refer me to anyone in the area who would be willing to take on the project. Well, good news. Their project manager responded promptly, and I think it may have even been a weekend. They said they do take on residential projects under the right circumstances, and the owner of the company would be in the Tri-Cities, anyway, since he would be in a meeting at Yoke's, which they had just done.

I couldn't be here to meet him, but my dad did, and he was sold on the idea. The owner suggested we have a small section of the floor done just to show what it would look like before we went any further. I chose four dye colors for them to demo, and their guy, using just hand tools, not the full machine, gave us something to look at, which some of you saw on Facebook. I like what I'm seeing, and I'll say it does look a bit better in person as opposed to in the picture. The full polish should be shinier, too.

They can put designs into the floor using the dyes, so I've been struggling, trying to come up with something. I'm thinking I want some 1' squares at the end of the room where the screen and main speakers will be. They'll be centered so I can use them for accurate positioning of the speakers. Then I want the squares to run into a big circle toward the center of the room. Not just a plain circle, but some sort of design based on a circle. Maybe a cog or something, and then I could have lines going in different directions. I'm not really sure how I want the design to transition into the dining/kitchen end of the main room, or into the bedroom and bathroom. Is anyone here interested in a design job? I have the main room drawn out on paper, but still not the full basement. I'd like to do it in something like SketchUp (which I just learned yesterday is now Trimble SketchUp, not Google SketchUp), but it was taking me too long to do the simplest things. I seem to be an ultra-slow learner with this kind of software. I'd pay if anyone here has the expertise to give me a hand at converting my idea into something in SketchUp. Otherwise, I'll see if the polished concrete guys have someone I should work with to get the design worked out. They didn't say how much time I'd have, but that I have a little because the grinding, patching, and evening out of the floor will take some work.

In any case, I'm excited about soon having some prettier pictures to share with everyone. Once the floor is done, I think it will really start to look like something that can actually be finished. Ha ha. It's only taken millennia.

Charles, I see that you're considering polished concrete 1' squares in various configurations, but is the remaining floor surface to be more acoustically friendly than concrete? The floor is generally the most convenient surface to reduce room liveliness.